Bad News
Senators Rick Santorum and Peter Hoekstra gleefully revealed their success in getting a Pentagon report on WMDs in Iraq declassified today. (read the whole posted link for a full transcript of the press conference) The report states that the U.S. Military did find and secure as many as 500 chemical munitions (weapons of mass destruction) in Iraq as far back as 2003. The report also claims that the government knows there are more weapons out there that have not yet been secured by the military.
Here’s my question: Why has Bush been quiet about this?
The belief that no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq has been used to pummel the president, Condi Rice, Rumsfeld and most all other administration officials and other supporters of the war in Iraq (me included) nearly every day since March of 2003 when the invasion started. Do you really think the administration would have taken all of this political damage if it weren’t extremely important that this knowledge be kept quiet? Senators Santorum and Hoekstra bragged about winning a fight with intelligence services in getting the portions of this WMD report they were reporting on declassified today. I know intelligence people can be a little over protective at times but doesn’t this topic seem like something they should be given the benefit of the doubt on? There has to be a good reason the Administration allowed itself to be pummeled on this topic rather than release this information. I wonder how much damage these “patriotic” Republican Senators did to our national security today? I wonder if we’ll ever know?
UPDATE (06/26/06 4:00 PM): Rep Hoekstra and Sen. Santorum are complaining in the Wall Street Journal today about stonewalling on the part of the Intelligence community in regards to the documents they “unveiled” last week.
Some officials in the intelligence community withheld the document we requested on WMDs, and somebody is resisting our request to declassify the entire document while briefing journalists in a tendentious manner. We will continue to ask for declassification of this document and the hundreds of thousands of other Saddam-produced documents, and we will also insist on periodic updates on discoveries in Iraq.
The demands they are making are absurd since it is obvious that the administration doesn’t want this stuff declassified. It seems to go beyond partisan politics for the administration which means it must be extemely important that this remain classified. The president will only gain more public approval for his ventures in Iraq if news about large stocks of captured WMDs comes to light…and yet…he wants this stuff kept quiet and even downplays the information recently released. I could be wrong about all of this but it sure seems counter-intuitive for the administration to be blocking these outspoken and desperate Republican congressmen if there isn’t a greater interest at stake.
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I was pinned to CNN and MSNBC as the US invaded Iraq. I even walked around work with a headphone earpiece in tuned into the local news station.
One of those early days, I watched an embedded reporter and his troops videotape that huge multi-building weapons stockpile outside of Baghdad. They broadcast it live, days before the whole place was lit up and buried. I watched as they went into one room where there were hundreds, maybe thousands of missile bodies that were all the same make, with Russian written on the side of them. I watched as a military veteran/analyst paused the videotape with the reporter during a close up of the bottom of the casing, and described all of the different ports on that casing, showing one to fill the missile with biotics. He stated that the missiles were made for one purpose only, to mass deliver biotics. (See shots of those and similar missiles here): http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/iraq_wmd/Iraq_Oct_2002.htm
Let’s stop for a second and ask… though that was not stockpiled WMD, what was it? And why issue gas masks to most of your troops? More interesting finds over the years continued this notion of mine. The stories were never picked up by the mass media. Thousands of gallons of ‘insecticide’ were found again and again, buried in stockholds in the desert. Huge amounts of insecticide + desert = ? Well, come to find out, this ‘insecticide’ is basically in the last stage chemically, before changing it into a bevy of chemical toxins. (See below)
“The materials that constitute Saddam’s chemical-weapons “stockpiles” look an awful lot like pesticides, which they indeed resemble. “Pesticides are the key elements in the chemical-agent arena,” Hanson says. “In fact, the general pesticide chemical formula (organophosphate) is the ‘grandfather’ of modern-day nerve agents.”
The rest of the story here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1125932/posts
I could go on, but I won’t. To me it never mattered if we found a ‘huge stockpile of WMD’. That’s not the only thing to look for. If you find mouse poop all over your kitchen cupboards, do you need more proof? Do you ‘wait until you see a stockpile of mice’ before you shout out your findings? We’ve seen everything BUT a mass biotoxin stockpile. That should scare us. We’ve seen one or two loaded missiles here and there. We’ve seen trailers that look like bio kitchens, recently hozed down with bleach. We’ve seen sarin and other bio agents come off of reporter’s shoes who were first into Iraqs terrorist camps during invasion. We’ve seen massive amounts of ‘insecticide’ and thousands of munitions for carrying them. We’ve seen testimonies from Saddam’s top dogs, including one who came to the US as a refugee last year and explained it all on the Sean Hannity show, of how all the really bad stuff was hauled into Syria days before the invasion.
We had Hussein pinned after 10 years of overflying, and he knew it. That’s why he was turning to biotoxins. He had nothing else to turn to. Little radar, little air force…
We, and the global community are idiots for assuming otherwise. That scares me.
Comment by Cody — June 22, 2006 @ 6:55 am
I’ve seen most of the same coverage you mentioned in your comment and I agree with you that it has been pretty obvious the whole time that this stuff was there and that we were finding it.
The thing that bugs me is that for some reason the Administration chose not to make a big deal about these finds even though the fear of WMDs was a major part of their justification for the invasion. For them to downplay this news seems self defeating…unless there is a good reason we don’t know about for why they want to keep it quiet. They haven’t done a good job doing this…but they have done a good job downplaying the fact that all of this poison was in Iraq and that they were right in the first place for using it as a justification for invasion. For politicians to be quiet and humble when they are proven right is WAY out of character and I think it indicates that something else is going on we don’t know about. I’m curious if it is a diplomatic courtesy to the Russians, Chinese or French (all of whom were very supportive of Hussein) or if this is a National Security type issue. Either way…I’m going to go against my usual policy and say that its pretty clear that the administration has a good reason for not making a big deal about this. Maybe they should have their way and those on the right should back off a bit on trying to blow this intelligence report up into a big news item.
Comment by Jeremy Manning — June 22, 2006 @ 12:30 pm
History has proven you correct in the majority of cases. Not one war the US has been involved in has gone unopposed, and with the exception of few of them, hindsight proves that the gut feelings that come when defending this country are usually correct. Today’s news (Chicago Sears Tower bombing cell plot) proves that we should be thanking the Iraqis for letting us battle these international terrorists on their soil. Notice the new Al-Qaeda in Iraq, like his predecessor, is not from Iraq. It’s either the battle in Iraq, or the battle in Chicago. The alternative to defending freedom in Iraq is actually quite bleak… battling international terrorist groups for freedom, here at home.
Comment by Cody — June 23, 2006 @ 7:31 am